Do you have a Facebook?  Probably.  Have we all spent multiple hours searching our friends, playing games, and doing whatever else that the wonderful world of Facebook allows us to do?  Definitely.   While at work?  Well, you do not have to answer that one.

The popular social networking site, Facebook has exploded in popularity since its first inception in February of 2004.  From “Farmville” to “Mafia Wars,” the amount of games and applications on Facebook has become borderline maddening.

But how does Facebook relate to the law?

Earlier this year, a man made headlines when his Facebook status update successfully acted as an alibi to a crime committed on the other side of town.  The man’s status update was made from his computer at the time of the crime, too far away from where the crime actually took place for him to feasibly have been involved.

Now, a mother finds her estranged children of over fifteen years by entering their names into the networking site.  According to the Associated Press, a woman’s husband took the children when they were toddlers and fled to Mexico.  Since then, the woman has been searching for her lost children to no avail; until she searched their names in Facebook.  Now her husband is arrested for kidnapping and she has been reunited with her children.  But it unfortunately is not happy ending; custody battles ensue as the children do not want anything to do with their estranged mother.

It is astonishing that such a simple social networking site can have such a drastic affect on people’s lives.  But society’s increasing reliance and acceptance of Facebook and similar sites have people wondering, “How far is too far?”  Is it possible that law-makers will need to add more specific rules for collecting evidence on such sites?  How does one know if evidence and alibis have been planted?

Excuse me, until these questions are answered, I believe I need to go water my Farmville carrots.